


Amid the Rubble

by jive



Series: Reaper76Week 2017 [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sharing Body Heat, reaper76week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-17 21:14:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9345335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jive/pseuds/jive
Summary: Reaper can't tell if it's sheer coincidence or dumb, bad utter fucking luck that he comes across Soldier: 76 atop one of the more remote and harsher mountains of the Swiss Alps. They're miles from Zürich, yet Reaper can tell without even asking the reason as to why he's here. Of course, even if Reaper were to ask, it isn't as if the Soldier is in any condition to answer him.Day 1 of Reaper76Week - "What We Were"





	

Reaper can't tell if it's sheer coincidence or dumb, bad utter fucking luck that he comes across Soldier: 76 atop one of the more remote and harsher mountains of the Swiss Alps. They're miles from Zürich, yet Reaper can tell without even asking the reason as to why he's here. Of course, even if Reaper were to ask, it isn't as if the Soldier is in any condition to answer him. 

He's folded over and seated against the sturdy trunk of a tree, and from the readouts Reaper’s own visor tells him — cleverly disguised and built-in his boney, barn owl mask — the Soldier is unconscious. The soldier’s breathing is both slow and shallow, temperature far lower than average, and Reaper knows from experience that a body’s shivering stops as hypothermia worsens. He would check for a pulse too, but there's no need; he already knows from the digital readout that it's slow. Not to mention, the last thing he wants to do is touch the Soldier's skin directly.

Logic tells him that he should leave the Soldier be, let him die to exposure, a slow death like he deserves.

Slow, but most definitely not painful. Not nearly enough.

Emotionally, Reaper’s own heart won't let him. The two of them have gone through too much — together and separately — for Reaper to allow himself to leave the Soldier to freeze to death.

His body moves without thinking when the Soldier’s pitches to one side, and before he falls over completely into the snow, Reaper catches him in his arms. The Soldier is far lighter than he had expected, and to Reaper’s surprise and displeasure, he can pretty much feel how thin he's become.

It's no wonder the Soldier is in this sorry state; in fact, Reaper would consider it a damn miracle he even made it this far up the mountain on foot if he didn't already know who was hiding beneath the mask.

“Morrison, you damn fool,” he spits.

Cursing himself and his own sentimentality — he lies to himself, saying it's only so that he can have the personal pleasure of ending the Soldier's life himself later on, after everything else has been settled — Reaper takes the Soldier into a fireman's carry, and, after discovering it buried in the snow nearby, he takes hold of the pack of provisions that the Soldier had brought with him.

It's only a few miles to Zürich, to the broken, crumbling remains of Overwatch’s former headquarters — where no doubt the Soldier had intended on going, as the path they both had been on was one of the only ways to get there on foot undetected — but Reaper knows the journey there shouldn't take more than but a second. Huffing an annoyed sigh through his nose, Reaper closes his eyes beneath his mask and focuses on the destination. 

He lets his body go, and both he and the Soldier vanish in a plume of smoke.

Immediately, Reaper berates himself for letting his mind focus too much on his memories when he and the Soldier rematerialize seconds later at the Zürich base. They find themselves in one of the few intact parts of the base amongst the crumbling ruins, but it's the last place Reaper wanted to end up.

It's the former shared quarters of Blackwatch Commander Gabriel Reyes and Strike Commander Morrison. His old room. The Soldier's old room.  _ Their _ old room. A room that holds far too many memories, many of which he can see partially buried beneath rubble and broken furniture, their picture frames shattered and splintered beyond repair. 

Save for the structural damage from some parts of a collapsed ceiling —  the residential part of the base remains protected from the elements by its surprisingly intact outer walls and roof — and the thick layer of dust that has settled over the room, it looks exactly like they he and Jack had left it so many years ago on that fateful morning. It's haunting, and every second he remains in the room, the greater the amount of bile and regret that builds up in his heart and throat. 

The quiet, weakened groan against his back, muffled by a face mask and visor, snaps Gabriel out of his bitter memories and reminds him as to why he's here. He drops the sack of provisions into a nearby chair and yanks at the bedsheets, smoke pouring out of his arm as it sweeps across the bed and clearing off all the dust and debris. Without ceremony, he dumps the body off of his back onto the bed once he's satisfied that it's significantly cleared off, frowning when he realizes that the impact wasn't enough to jolt Jack out of his unconsciousness.

His state must be far worse than Gabriel first realized, and his suspicions are more or less confirmed when he removes Jack's visor and mask to see alarmingly clammy skin and lips so pale they're almost blue. He needs to act quickly, and before he even realizes it, Gabriel's body moves almost on autopilot. 

He grabs as many blankets as possible from the linen closet, shaking out every bit of dust from them as possible before he goes back to the bed. Immediately, he sets to removing all of Jack's wet, sweat-and-snow-soaked clothing off of his body, leaving them all in a heap on the floor to take care of later. No doubt Jack would have strong words for him once he wakes up, but given how necessary it is to allow Gabriel's body heat — his constant state of simultaneous degeneration and regeneration turning his body into a furnace more or less — to penetrate into his cold skin, Gabriel can only think about how he won't even bothering listening to them unless they're expressions of gratitude.

Gabriel climbs into bed with Jack the second the last bit of clothing is taken off, and he berates himself at the way calm washes over him when he gathers Jack into his arms and holds him close. He tugs the blankets up over the both of them and feels nostalgia gnawing away at him from the inside like an unwelcome parasite.

He can't help but succumb to the thoughts of just how familiar this entire thing feels, how much he's missed holding Jack close like this, skin-against-skin and sharing body heat between them. Unconsciously, Jack shivers in his arms, and weakly huddles in even closer, uncaring that the body embracing him is nothing at all like the one that used to hold him so many years ago.

And while it should annoy and discomfort Gabriel that the body he's embracing is so different than the one he knew so well once upon a time — a body made of hard muscles and lingering bits of baby fat now long gone and replaced with a slightly emaciated one, thinner in all the wrong ways, ways that only come from being malnourished and homeless for god-knows-how-long — it doesn't. 

Not at all. 

Gabriel finds himself more concerned than anything, mind reeling and wandering in regards to what kind of life Jack's been leading these last six years to have eaten away at him like this. He has a vague idea, from his past encounters with him — few, but significant enough that they both discovered each other's identities beyond Reaper and Soldier: 76 — but it doesn't make him feel any happier to know. 

He shouldn't care about Jack's well-being like this. Not after everything that's happened. Not after the events that caused the rubble surrounding them at this very moment. Not after…

Gabriel sighs.

He shouldn't, but he does. 

Despite everything, he still cares about Jack Morrison. He can't not.

With a frown on his face, he closes his eyes and tightens his hold on Jack. The Reaper doesn't need sleep, not much, but Gabriel Reyes is tired, and before long, he finds himself asleep and dreaming.

He dreams of a mission set in the arctic tundra of Alaska. He dreams of Jack Morrison diving into a frozen lake after him,after the surface cracked and splintered beneath Gabriel's feet when he knocked an omnic out of the sky with a well-aimed shot with a grenade launcher. He dreams of being fished out of freezing waters and hypothermia slowly setting into his flesh and bones while the both of them waited for an extraction. He dreams of sharing body heat with Jack just like he is now, skin-against-skin and far more intimately than the two of them had ever been before. 

He dreams of warm lips against his own, murmuring a confession of love that he had believed wasn't reciprocated for the longest time.

_ “I thought I lost you, Gabe… I thought I'd never be able to tell you how I felt about you. I love you. I wasn't ready to let you go yet.” _

_ “I'm not going anywhere, Jackie. Not without you. You'd miss me too much… and I'd miss you too. I love you.” _

Gabriel wakes up hours later to find himself wrapped around Jack just like he had been in his dream and before he fell asleep. 

Blue eyes look up at him, weak but alert and cautious. 

“What are you doing, Gabriel?” he asks, voice sounding even more wrecked than Gabriel can remember from their last encounter together. “Why didn't you kill me when you had the chance…?”

“Saving you,” he answers, “What kind of person would I be if I left my husband to die on our anniversary....?”

Jack says nothing, but the wary look on his face speaks enough about worries of betrayal that has Gabriel frowning.

“Go to sleep, Jack. We'll talk when you're better,” Gabriel sighs, pressing his forehead against Jack's own. To his surprise Jack listens, and the two of them drift back to sleep just like they had done back in Alaska, this time amid the rubble of what they once were.


End file.
